Hi everyone! I’ve recently joined the Comms team as an Assistant Administrator. This week I’ve been getting to know the team and learning about how the CDPS aims to deliver for the public sector.
It’s an incredibly inspiring organisation to be part of. The way the CDPS works is quite different from organisations I’ve worked in before but in the best possible way. There’s a great emphasis on teamwork and collaboration, and I can’t wait to learn about and contribute towards the success of all the projects we’re working on!
Haia pawb, Elise yma!
The team for the new a-sync User Research Course are currently in their first sprint. This initial sprint has really shown me how important it is to be involved from the get go as a Comms person working in projects.
Hearing from the team what is going to be needed as we move through the next quarter has been incredibly useful, and I’ve been able to communicate this back to the core Comms team and flag where we might need design and translation eyes on content in plenty of time. This is especially useful as we’ve been considering the design and translation needs for larger pieces of content (over 300 PowerPoint slides!)
As part of this, the comms team had a great discussion on bilingual content. Although currently we don’t offer training through the medium of Welsh, we have agreed it is important for us to provide supporting resources in the Welsh language. With the a-sync User Research course this will allow Welsh speakers to go through the course content in Welsh, even if the touchpoint sessions are delivered by our trainers in English.
Gem yma. Where on earth is January going!? I completed my first full week back this week which has meant getting up to speed with all the goings on within CDPS.
As part of my internal comms role I write a weekly update which condenses the main activities across the organisation into a notion page so that everyone can keep up to speed. The good thing about the Notion page is I can see how many views we’ve had and who last viewed it, plus I think it’s nicer than a newsletter which can get lost in the deep abyss of inboxes!
I find working in a fully remote organisation has it’s challenges and we don’t have ‘water cooler’ moments like you’d have in a traditional office setting. One of my passions to trying to break down siloes and join the dots.
I ran an internal comms survey at the end of last year which I’m looking forward to unpicking in the coming weeks. Feedback I have had about the weekly round up has been mixed. Some find it too text heavy, some people absolutely love it…I think 2024 is a good time to take stock and have a re-think in terms of content. My plan is to run a focus group internally to gather proper feedback on internal comms approaches.
At the moment it does the job - SLT and Service owners input into it and I cherry-pick other things the team may find interesting. It’s not just the run-of-the-mill stuff either, we have ‘Cornel Cymraeg’ and ‘Something to make you smile’ to encourage the use of Welsh / learn Welsh culture AND have something fun to lighten things. I’m looking forward to tweaking and experimenting to see what works so watch this space!